Breaking the cycle

This past weekend my family found itself in the midst of a hands-on live nature display featuring snakes. We were encouraged to hold and handle the non-poisonous snakes. We thought this to be a great opportunity and all of us (one after a little encouragement) proceeded to hold and admire the snake. They were beautiful creatures, and feel very smooth and cool to touch. I took pictures of my daughters holding the snakes and posted them on Facebook, and the main theme of people's comments was about how brave my girls were. Bravery is a word I do not throw around carelessly, and given that the whole incident was rather matter of fact for us, I was surprised that handling snakes was considered that unusual. I know most women go eek at the sight of the smallest of creatures. I have always seen that as a conditioned response - we see other women in real life and in movies act like this so we automatically start behaving that way. Somebody has to break the cycle! I make a conscious effort to not freak out at the sight of a bug in front of my children - not that I am inclined to except at the sight of a certain centipede, but subconscious is a very strong thing. Now I have two girls who don't go eek and maybe the cycle will be broken.

Talking of cycles there is another one that I am trying to break. Growing up, my mother did all the household chores. Even us children were not expected to help, and although she complained sometimes she never asked for help. Consequently I grew up not knowing much about cooking or doing laundry. Strangely though, once I was married I took on all the housekeeping chores just as my mother had, and I know she was doing what her own mother had done. Having to do all these chores without knowing how to do them coupled with the responsibilities of a full-time job drove me right out of my mind. And yet it did not occur to me until recently that I should ensure that my daughters do not fall into the same trap i.e. not learning to take care of themselves and thinking that as the woman of the house they should do all the chores. The cycle must be broken! TO this end I am making an effort to ask for help and letting my husband do chores such as washing dishes, and have started expecting the girls to do their own laundry and keep their environs in order. Given how tedious it is to stay after kids asking them to pick up clothes off the floor and teaching them how to fold clothes and organize their drawers, I am not surprised that my mother did it all. I swear, I could get it all done faster and with much less aggravation if I did it myself, but I have to keep the long term goal in mind. Break the cycle!

Children are so inconvenient, at least in America.

I read an opinion piece about how a CNN story about little children in airplanes kicked off a storm of arguments in the comments area on the CNN website. That piece got me to another blog post, written by a woman who usually writes about her cats, but took a break to whine about how her already terrible flying experience was ruined by an ill-behaved child, and how she wanted to punch both the mother and the baby. I wasn't even done being horrified when the post ended and I was in comment-land, and all the comments lauded the post as 'funny' and completely agreed with the fact that parents of crying babies ought to be put in jail or something akin to that.

We can, of course, argue about whether it is possible to comfort a crying child hundred percent of the time. After all, babies do unpredictable things such as crying uncontrollably and pooping in their pants. We can also argue about whether a mother is 'bad', if she is paying more attention to her child, and is more concerned with keeping her child happy rather than some snarky stranger shooting her ugly looks. We can definitely talk about the sense of entitlement one must feel to be thinking that her cats are worth telling the whole world about yet declaring that little children ruin her flying experience in the cheapest section of the plane.

I do a lot of international flying, and even my children notice how much friendlier people in other countries are towards them. At foreign airports, the security personnel smile, even joke, with my children as we pass through security. Flight attendants in foreign airlines carry my bags if I am carrying a child and help the children with their carry-ons. En route, if my children are asleep during a meal service, the flight attendants offer, on their own, to pack away a meal for the sleeping child so that she has something to eat when she wakes up. When my toddler fidgets, I get fewer nasty looks from international passengers on a twelve hour trans-pacific flight, than I do from Americans in a two hour flight.

What I am reminded of, again, is how child-unfriendly America is. We have the fanciest of malls and department stores here, and yet you will not find a child-sized toilet or sink in them. Look through housekeeping magazines, filled with pages after pages of pictures of beautiful homes, but you will not see a child or even a place where a child could feel comfortable. Children and their possessions are completely isolated in the child's rooms and you can get lot of advice on how to keep the children and all their stuff perfectly ensconced in that one room, and how to make rest of the house your 'sanctuary'. More and more houses are designed with a 'split plan' - parents' bedrooms on the opposite side of the house as the children's bedrooms so that you can get as far away as you can from your children, while still being in the same house. Images of adults having a good time are completely devoid of children; the message, that for a family to have fun, parents and children must be separated is repeatedly broadcast in ads and other media images.

I hate to promote a commercial venture, but you just have to step into a foreign-designed IKEA store to have this starkly put in perspective - they have a childcare center, child-friendly bathrooms and meals, and they sell their sofas with pictures of children bouncing on them. I dare you to find even one American furniture seller's catalog with a child anywhere near the living room furniture. A dog, maybe, but no children. As if, children don't live in American living rooms. The side-affect of all this is that, subconsciously our feelings of what a home, a vacation or fun, should be gets altered and then our life becomes unfriendly to children too. At such times I like to remember something my friend passed on to me "remember you are raising a human being, not managing an inconvenience."

First Christmas

The holiday season is here, and although I think I was ahead in planning this year, I am still feeling overwhelmed by the shopping, entertaining house guests, school events etc. This takes me back to my first Christmas in the US.

I had arrived in the US in October as a poor graduate student's wife without the requisite visas to work or study. In the mid-west it was already colder than anything I was used to so I spent a lot of time inside my tiny apartment with not much more than a radio for entertainment. By end of November (yes, back then they still waited until after Thanksgiving to kick off the Christmas season) the airwaves were swamped with holiday ads. The overwhelming theme was shopping and stress resulting from shopping. Growing up in a country where Christians are a small minority and the economy was closed, Christmas didn't really register. We got a day off from school, and the couple of Christians in our neighborhood hung a star shaped lantern outside their house. If not for that, I don't think we would even know about Christmas. Of course I knew of Santa and assumed that the children in a Christian house each got a toy, everyone went to church and that was Christmas - a rather staid and boring holiday, that didn't even come close to the really fun Hindu holidays such as Holi & Diwali. Coming from that background, all the shopping frenzy and the stress implied by the radio hosts and ads, made no sense whatsoever. When I met my American sister-in-law during the season that first year, I asked her my naive question "Why is Christmas about shopping? I quite can't connect the two". She looked at me as if I was a cave-dweller who had just stepped out from some jungle into modern civilization. She was completely at loss as to how to answer my question, not sure where to begin. She looked helplessly at my brother-in-law and said "haven't you told your family about Santa?" and I am quite sure she muttered something about ignorant country bumpkins under her breath. Still I stood there clueless, unable to decipher how knowing about Santa explained anything about the implied Christmas stress. How can buying a toy each, for the children in your house be that stressful? I didn't ask any further questions although I am sure I seriously tarnished the image of my countrymen in my sister-in-law's eyes forever.

Now I can relate to the stress and the shopping mania quite well, but I am still not sure that if that is a good thing.

Milestones

When our kids are little we track all the little milestones - the first solid food, the first word, the first step. As they got older I stopped paying attention to milestones and hence I thought I'd record the milestones my older kids have reached this year as they turned 6 and 8.

1. My older one started talking to her friends on the phone. Doesn't do a lot but seems comfortable with calling up people she wants to talk to
2. My younger one learned to tie her shoelaces. I bought her shoes with laces, quite accidentally, and she became a pro at it in two weeks. I have never bought my older one tie-up shoes and so she still can't do laces.
3. My older one has gotten more conscious about dressing/undressing in front of others. She also becoming more aware of her body.
   
4. Older one has started doing a little cooking. She makes very nice chocolate muffins from a recipe she got on a Barbie website, I think, and needs almost no help during the process. She can also make herself a scrambled egg with some help.
5. The girls walked to school on their own. OK so they did it once and didn't want to again. They come home from school by themselves too. I go to pick them up and then stand around chatting to other moms. They take the keys and leave, and reach home 5-10 minutes before I do. It is still something that would not have happened last year.

What about your kids? Have they reached any such noticeable milestones?

How many children - more

Now that I have finally made peace with this and a decision, and have moved on to pondering other matters such as the best all-purpose cleaner, the question of number of children has decided to follow me around like a little puppy. Won't leave me alone.

I just talked to my sister who informs me that she has decided to have no more children. The reason being "One is enough, we can give her everything without compromise and can't imagine starting all over."

Alright. Deep breaths. Everyone has a right to their opinion & I should respect it. I have bossed over her all her life, enough now. Her life, her body, her ...aargh! But I also have the right to be shocked and demand a better explanation than that. Damn it! I am the big sister - not just hers but in the entire generation! "Give the only child everything" - we aren't exactly talking of people here who don't know where the next paycheck is coming from. These are people who can afford to own apartments & cars in not one but two countries. Did I mention she is younger than me, by many years, and the first child is all of 4 years old? Oh, and she has a maid and her MIL, whom she gets along with quite nicely, lives with her and is happy to supervise the "staff" so it's not like my sister has to give up her job. I would think they can provide and care for their own, and few of mine and still have left over to give whatever it is they want to give their first child.

In truth, I am venting here because I didn't on the phone. I didn't say any of this to her. Only suggested that she might want to reconsider before it is truly too late to have more children. I begged a little on her first child's behalf. No more.

How many children - part 2

I believe that if a woman is going to have one child then she should, if she can, have at least one more. Multiple children in a family liberate both the mother and the children themselves. Of course, there are many reasons a woman can't have more children and then that is that, and so is life.

If you have a child you know the pressure that comes with it; you feel that you are shaping a life and how the child turns out is completely up to you. It is a roller coaster ride of guilt and congratulations - a heavy burden to go through life with. It was not until I had a second child that I realized that how a child behaves depends so much on the innate nature of the child. There is this other child, living under the same circumstances and rules, and behaving differently. I wasn't messing up my first child, after all! That made me less of an egotist - how the child turns out, good or bad, wasn't entirely my doing. I am not that important! I realized it wasn't so much nature vs. nature but rather that I had to nurture the nature. And that liberated me, I could relax a little and not blame myself for everything.

Looking from the child's perspective, they do not have to bear the entire brunt of the parents' expectations if there are other siblings. And once the parents are old, they don't have to shoulder the entire responsibility either. When my dad had a heart attack, I knew that there were two other people in the world who felt exactly as I did at the moment, whom I could call in the middle of the night and talk to. And because one of my siblings lives much closer to my parents, I didn't have to drop everything and run half way across the world. I could relax in the thought that the needful will be done. This was again a liberating experience for me, as a child.

So there, that is my theory!

24/7 entertainment

We are about to embark on a road trip - 4 hours drive each way. The invariable first thought is how to keep the children entertained on this long drive. A portable DVD player would be nice. Should I go out and buy a few new toys and books, for a secret stash that I can pull out when somebody starts to get bored?

Or should I completely disown the responsibility of entertaining my children? That is a thought. As a child, we used to take these three day long train rides every year with nothing more than a few books and board games. I used be entertained by watching out the window and seeing how the terrain across the country changed from state to state. We would make new friends in the train and learn new card games. At the end of that journey we would spend a month at my grandma's village with no electricity, toys or games. When I think of happiness, those are the times that come to my mind first. The times where endless summer days stretched in front of me without any planned entertainment or anything to do. I didn't learn horseback riding or ballet, but I did discover the simple pleasure of lying under a mango tree listening to a cuckoo.

These are the simple pleasures that I still long for - to have days where I do nothing more than lie under a tree and read a book. I want my children to find watching scenery out of a window entertainment enough, to be able to daydream, to not need 24/7 multi-media entertainment. This is one reason I have stubbornly refused to buy a DVD player for the car or portable video games. And the sole reason I would like to skip going for vacations to Hawaii and Europe, and save the money to buy a small cottage in the hills that we could visit on weekends and live during summer vacations. Dil dhoondtä hai, phir vahi, fürsat kè räät din as Gulzar would say.

But long drives always test my will. Little kids, when bored, can drive you nuts, especially when they start picking on their siblings for entertainment and I start wishing I had gotten that Gameboy after all.

How many children?

Growing up in India, my neighbor had four daughters. It was obvious that they were the results of failed attempts to have a boy, and I thought it pretty backward of them. This is not what educated people did. This thinking was firmly planted in the heads of young minds, and correctly so, by a huge Government campaign to control the population. "Hum do. Humare do" went the slogan - "we two, our two." Encouraging people to stop after two children. It was a very sensible campaign, focused on educating people rather than doing this by force, as in China. It was also immensely successful if you measure it by the fact that it changed the minds of almost all educated individuals and having two children became the norm.

Now I live in the US, the land of liberty and plentiful resources where no norms apply, and have two children as a good Indian should. I am also very far away from all my close family. Even those that are not on the other side of the globe, are so busy in this modern life that we cannot meet them on a regular basis and for extended periods, as we did with our cousins when growing up. The result is that my children have no close family. When I imagine the distant future, after I and my husband are gone, my girls look very lonely in this huge world. All they will have at weddings & other celebrations is each other. I have known the joy of having a large extended family. You really have to experience it, and then be completely isolated from it, to realize its value. As I see it to be a good parent I have to provide for my daughters' future. Not only do I have to secure their financial future by investing, but I must also provide the emotional security of a large family. I can't really rely on cousins, aunts and uncles for that because who has the time in this hectic life to bond with cousins? Hence in these modern era, I have to take a huge step backward and embrace the Gandhian principle of self-reliance - create the large family on my own by having more children!

OK, so we have decided that there must be more but how many more? My two children are very close in age, and hence very close to each other. They play together constantly. Even if I were to conceive today there will be a six year gap between the baby and the youngest child. The girls will love the new baby, but I doubt they will ever have the patience to play with her. seeing the girls together now, and how amazing it is to have a playmate your age, it'd be pretty see a lonely kid in the house. This means I must have two more babies, and pretty close together. I have been through a stage where I had a baby and a toddler, and those were not easy times. I tell my kids that being brave doesn't mean not being scared, rather doing what you have to even when you are scared. Am I brave enough to take that challenge?

Over to the next challenge. I know that the instant I announce a pregnancy, since I have two daughters, the reaction would be "Oh she is trying for a boy. How backward of her!" I don't think I will have the energy to explain my reasoning to everyone. Do I have the gumption to withstand that criticism? Can I really say "I don't care what other people think"?

And finally what of money? Supporting four kids is no joke. Can I really give up on that dream house and exotic vacations? That leads to even deeper self-examination - understanding the true meaning of joy and completely believing that it does not come from material things. I am no yogi. Can I live without?

So it begins

Raising children is hard work. Of course there is the physical stress - the diapers, the homeworks, the endless picking up of toys, the aches and pains of a post child-birth body. But there are things even more profound that boggle the mind. After all, I am shaping lives here, and in an environment so different from what I grew up in, on the other side of the planet. It is all very alien- the schools, the society, the neighborhoods, the values. The challenges for an immigrant are unique and the parenting books don't provide all the answers. My mind, ideas and thoughts, straddle a few oceans, literally. I look at people like V.S.Naipaul, a great writer no doubt but so full of disdain for his roots, and hope my children don't think like that. How do I grow human beings whose roots are firmly planted, and yet they can flourish in my adopted country? And so my dilemmas, and those of many more like me, begin.